Friday, December 23, 2011

Puka Dog!

Fact: Buddies will go to great lengths to track down the best dogs out there. I'm no exception and this entry here took me to the Hawaiian Islands with an additional flight to hop from Maui to Oahu to make sure I didn't miss the culinary marvel that is the Puka Dog.

But first before we get to the Puka I had a couple other dog encounters on this island of pork lovers that I'll tell ya about. First was this lonely li'l fella at the Komoda Store & Bakery in Makawao.

This dag had a strange mayo/mustard on it. Not the best dog I ever had but I felt obliged to give it a home. I suggest you stick to the badass pastries like the guava filled doughnuts they make daily.

Next up outside the Whalers Village Museum there was a place selling Hula Maid Pineapple Dogs. Couldn't pass that up. This was a perfectly fine dog. A little sweet and a nice snap. Nothing you have to seek out but if you find yourself in Hawaii and see a place selling them you might as well get into it.

The next thing I stumbled on was how Hawaiian's will stick anything on sticky rice and wrap it with seaweed, even hot dogs. It's called Musubi.

Spam Musubi and Spam in general are also very popular as proven in this beautiful pic.

But my favorite thing was Longanisa Musubi. Even better I ate this sucker on a 10,023 ft volcano called Haleakala

But as mentioned in the first part of this post, the main thing I was looking forward to on this trip was Puka Dog

We spent most of the day at the Pearl Harbor memorial and ended up hitting rush hour to get across town to the Puka spot. While Maui is mainly two lane, slow pace roads, Oahu was like being in fucking Dallas. If you've ever been to Dallas you know that equals S-U-C-K. There was even a moment when we wondered if we could actually make it and get back to the airport to fly back to Maui. Things got tense buddies but I put the pedal to the metal and made it happen.

The Puka spears that toast the inside of the bun.

The multitude of condiments

We both went for the Polish with Yancy picking pineapple relish, mild lemon garlic and lilikoi mustard. I got hot lemon garlic sauce, banana relish and guava mustard.

About

Some men need religion. Some need a wife and 2.5 kids. Others need 567 friends on Facebook. Some might even want calf implants. We're dudes who need just two things to get through those days filled with tumult, despair, and that feeling deep in your gut things will only get worse and sooner than you can possibly even imagine you will be dead from something you have no control over and forgotten forever. Those two things? A good buddy and a good hot dog. This site's for them.

Document a good buddy adventure lately? Would you like to share your favorite hot dog pictures? Please, send it all to jakeblancaster@gmail.com. After all, what good is a buddy if he doesn't know how to share?